For years now, Windows users have had an unofficial tool called Ninite. The idea is that, when you purchase a new PC, you usually have to visit every website of every app you use and re-download everything. Ninite makes this process easier by offering the installation media for the most popular apps, which you can pick and choose from. Once you've picked out which apps you want, you download them all in one bundle and install them all with a single double-click.

Well, it turns out that someone has made something similar for Linux distros. Aimed at helping new people out with getting started with Linux, I can also see it being an amazing time saver for veterans after they distro hop for the 10th time in a year. And if it can't get an app you want, it'll let you know how you can download it manually.

TuxMate makes setting up a fresh distro a ton easier

And it's easy to use

In a post on the Linux subreddit, user N1C4T showed off what they've been working on. It's a website called TuxMate, and it lets you bundle together all the apps you want to use into one place for an easy download. It works similarly to Ninite, but with one big difference; instead of offering you an executable to download and run, it will instead gradually build a command you can run in the Linux terminal. Just copy-paste it into the terminal, and you're good to go.

Of course, different distros use different command syntaxes to get the job done, so you do need to do a little bit of setup first. When you land on the website, take a peek at the drop-down box at the top right. Click it, and set it to your distro; at the time of writing, TuxMate supports Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Nix, Flatpak, Snap, and Homebrew. If you don't see your distro on the list, make sure that you're not using a distro that's built off one of these cores. For instance, if you're on EndeavourOS (which is built on Arch Linux), you'd pick Arch in the menu.

Unfortunately, not all distros will support every app on the website. Unsupported apps for your distro will be grayed out with an exclamation mark next to them. Mouse over the exclamation mark to read why you can't download it via the console and instructions on how you can grab it manually.

If you're a little suspicious of a website that claims to make downloading apps easier (and you should be), the creator uploaded the source code to GitHub for you to peruse. Otherwise, TuxMate seems like the perfect tool for someone making a new home away from home.